informal speech

Factba.se counts as remarks any informal speech that lasts less than 30 minutes and excludes major events such as the inaugural address or joint address to Congress.

You and your husband should also take this opportunity to have an age-appropriate talk with your daughter about descriptive versus prescriptive approaches to grammar—not to mention variations in dialect, formal versus informal speech, and whether it’s worth “correcting” someone whose meaning is clear even if their language isn’t perfect.

“With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture and frank ruminations on the meaning of life, ‘The Moviegoer’ is the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours,” writes Elie.

With its slack and offhand protagonist, its present-tense narration, its effortless mix of informal speech, images from popular culture, and frank ruminations on the meaning of life, “The Moviegoer” is, in my estimation, the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours.

The pungent reaction baffled linguists, who had long appreciated—and begun to seriously study—the “languageness” of Black English and other informal speech variants, such as Jamaican Patois, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole.